Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids.

The chain said it will ask a judge Thursday to approve a sale to liquidators led by Hilco Merchant Resources and Gordon Brothers Group.

The liquidation of the company’s remaining 399 stores could start as soon as Friday, and the chain is expected to go out of business for good by the end of September, the company said.

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Bids for Borders were due at 5:00 p.m. EDT Sunday ahead of a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday.

Still, Borders is likely to entertain offers right up until the scheduled auction in the hopes a white knight will emerge to save the chain.

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In fact, the e-reader was never supposed to be a big part of its business, but now it is seeing the merits of pursuing a hardware business as well.

Today, the Toronto-based company is unveiling its latest e-reader, which comes with the same gray-scale displays that the devices are known for, but boasts a touch display. Users will be able to flip to the next page of the book with a swipe of their finger, a much more natural motion than having to use a directional keypad.

Starting today, the new Kobo eReader Touch Edition will be available for pre-order at Indigo in Canada and Best Buy, Borders and Wal-mart in North America. It will cost $130, and will start shipping in early June.

The company’s first-generation device will be marked down to $100.

“By default, we launched the first device to get into the market,” said Todd Humphrey, Kobo’s EVP of business development. “But what we found is we were able to remain competitive….We are an e-book company, but the device is part of that strategy. We’ll continue to put out top-tier devices in the market.”

Kobo, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in December, announced in April that it had raised a $50 million round in venture capital to help it go up against some serious competition.

Also pursuing e-books are much larger rivals, such as Apple with the iPad, Amazon with the Kindle and even Google. Additionally, Barnes & Noble, which has invested heavily in the Nook, plans to introduce a new e-reader tomorrow at an event in New York.

Humphrey said the decision to produce additional devices does not mean the company is less invested in the digital e-book side of the business.

“I think we are a hardware company in the sense that the device is a pure reading device. They aren’t suddenly getting emails or ads, or allowing people to play Angry Birds. Our consumers have told us they like a single-purpose device, and we will continue to meet the needs of our customers,” he said.

Other e-readers are morphing into tablets as companies see the success of the iPad, and Amazon is rumored to be working on one of its own.

Kobo says it has more than 3.6 million users in more than 100 countries.

But it has not disclosed how many of its original Kobo devices it sold, just like Amazon, which also refuses to say how many Kindles it has sold. The biggest hint it provided recently was that it is now selling more e-book titles than paperback and hardback combined.

Humphrey would not say if a tablet would be next for Kobo or not.

“We have nothing to announce, but we are looking at all the options. We want to enable great reading experiences,” he said.

Last week, the six-month-old service’s profile received a big boost after eBay announced it was buying its parent company, GSI Commerce, for $2.4 billion.

As part of the acquisition, eBay plans to spin off a few of the company’s properties to create a well-funded entity.

The spin-off includes ShopRunner, GSI’s licensed sports merchandise business, and Rue La La, a flash sales site. EBay, which is retaining a 30 percent stake in the new entity, is also loaning it nearly $500 million in capital.

ShopRunner, which is headquartered along with GSI outside Philadelphia in King of Prussia, is positioning itself as a defensive play for retailers that are competing against the Amazonian e-commerce giant.

Amazon Prime members pay $79 a year for free two-day shipping on all orders, and more recently, Prime added additional perks, such as free access to 5,000 streaming movies. Similarly, consumers pay ShopRunner $79 for free two-day shipping, but it works across a number of retailers, such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, Toys R Us, Drugstore.com, PetSmart and 40 sites in all.

Mike Golden, ShopRunner president and co-founder of GSI Commerce, says the service is super relevant today as retailers try to defend themselves against Amazon’s increasing dominance.

Not only is it growing its market share online, but it is also becoming a threat in physical stores. He said consumers are increasingly looking at brick-and-mortar stores as showcases, where they can touch and feel products, but then use their smartphones to comparison shop and buy online.

With free two-day shipping, Prime has become the modern day loyalty program.

But it’s unclear how successful Amazon’s so-called Prime service has been since launching in 2005.

Golden claims he’s done his homework and believes it is one of the smartest moves by the Seattle-based retailer to date. And by tracking what analysts have said and by conducting focus groups with dozens of Amazon’s Prime customers, he feels he has a fairly good handle on how well Amazon is doing.

Amazon does not release data on Amazon’s Prime service, and a spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

So, with that in mind, here’s a bullet point list of Golden’s estimates, which he considers conservative:

• In nine purchases out of ten, a Prime consumer would have already qualified for free shipping because their order was above $25. Now, Amazon is collecting $79 a year and all they had to do was upgrade one out of 10 shipments.
• Out of the 25 million items Amazon sells, he believes only 30 percent are eligible for Prime (the item has to be stored in Amazon’s own warehouses to qualify). That means Amazon has an impressive seven to 10 million products that are eligible.
• There are at least five million Prime users in the U.S.
• After joining Prime, users spend two to three times more.
• Prime members were already some of Amazon’s best customers, who were spending on average $600 a year. With Prime, that goes up to $1,200 to $1,800.
• In total, Prime members spend roughly $7.5 billion annually.
• 88 percent of Prime members start their shopping experience on Amazon, rather than any other portal, like Google.

Golden said the three attributes that have made Amazon successful are: having a huge assortment of products, having a huge reach in terms of customers and being a place where people shop frequently. ”We don’t think there’s any other retailer that has the strength to replicate the value proposition that Prime has,” he said. “How do you compete with Prime? You have to have a stronger value prop, not a weaker one, and all we’ve seen launch so far has been weaker and has failed.”

Other stores have tried one-off super saver shipping programs, including Sears, William Sonoma, Walmart and Overstock.

He said what they needed was a coalition.

While Golden was generously willing to share what he knew about Amazon’s Prime program, he was fairly mum about how ShopRunner’s math pencils out. Of course…

But roughly speaking, he said the membership fees consumers pay, along with the cost of two-day shipping, is split among the retailers and ShopRunner, which is then compensated for managing the program.

This week, ShopRunner launched a Marketplace where members can visit one location to search for products they want. This way, they don’t have to memorize which retailers are associated with the program. When searching for watches, you’ll see results from Toys R Us, Drugstore.com, Calvin Klein, Sports Authority and Lord & Taylor. Once an item is clicked on, the user is redirected to that retailer’s Web site to complete the transaction.

Next month, ShopRunner will roll out an iPhone application that allows people to search for merchandise in the store, but ultimately buy from one of the participating retailers online.

He said ShopRunner has more than five million items available overall. When they launch an additional 40 retailers soon, it will have 10 million items, which is getting close to Amazon’s scale.

Golden said the lines between brick and mortar and e-commerce are blurring. It’s no longer a weakness to have low inventory in a story if you can steer users to your online site, where they can get free shipping. A mobile application can help with that–and no longer be considered a threat.

“By using ShopRunner along with smart use of leveraging your store footprints and your e-commerce and distribution centers, they have a better chance of not making it a weakness or a threat, but a competitive advantage,” Golden said.

The troubled Ann Arbor, Mich., bookseller could file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-protection as soon as Monday or Tuesday, paving the way for hundreds of store closings and thousands of job losses, said people familiar with the matter.

Borders’s finances crumbled amid declining interest in bricks-and-mortar booksellers, a broad cultural trend for which it offered no answers. The bookseller suffered a series of management gaffes, piled up unsustainable debts and failed to cultivate a meaningful presence on the Internet or in increasingly popular digital e-readers.

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Lots of today’s Google eBook launch has already been covered in the past (this Wall Street Journal piece from last week got a lot of it). And since I haven’t been able to actually take the store and software out for a run, I can’t vouch for any of it so far.

But here’s what you need to know at the start:

• Google is opening its own store, but the big goal is to set up an ecosystem and e-commerce channel that works across the Web.
• That means you can buy ebooks directly from Google, and you can also buy books from the sites of independent book shops, like Powell’s Books.
• That also means you can read the books on multiple platforms: There’s an Android app, of course. But there’s also an Apple-approved app in the iTunes store. And since the system is Web-based, you can read the books you buy on PCs and tablets, too. As well as e-readers from Sony, Barnes & Noble and Borders. The only place you can’t read Google-purchased titles–Amazon’s Kindle.
• Google says its catalog will be competitive with everyone else’s, though it’s hard to assess that without really digging in. It says it will have some three million books available in the store, “hundreds of thousands” of which which are commercial titles. Amazon, by comparison, boasts of 750,000 titles, but it’s including periodicals in that total.
• One distinct advantage Google has over a particular rival: Unlike Apple, it has access to Random House titles, which aren’t available on the iBooks platform due to a dispute about pricing.
• Speaking of pricing: Google says it supports both the traditional wholesale/retail model, as well as the new “agency” model that Apple has been pushing.
• Where’s all this going? Good question! Google executives argue that this is just a natural extension of its ongoing books project, which is supposed to make as many books available to as many people, period–it’s just that they happen to be selling some of them now. But view it from a different lens, and it looks like yet another attempt by Google to move from pointing to stuff, and selling ads along the way, to selling stuff, period. It hasn’t worked yet, but the company seems dead set on making a go of it.

The program, called ShopRunner, will cost $79 per year—the same as the Prime shipping program offered by the largest online-only retailer Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN).

Participants include many existing GSI Commerce e-commerce service clients such as Toys “R” Us Inc. and GNC Corp. In the coming weeks, outside retailers such as Borders Group Inc. (BGP), Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) and Drugstore.com (DSCM) will also join ShopRunner.

“If it wasn’t for the scale, these retailers were likely to have done something like this on their own,” said Mike Golden, president of Shop Runner Inc., which is wholly owned by GSI Commerce. He declined to say how much the companies were paying to participate in the program, but GSI is spending about $5 million this year to launch ShopRunner.

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Time to catch up, Kindle competitors that aren’t Apple (AAPL). Borders (BGP) is starting out by cutting the price of its flagship Kobo reader to $129, down from $149. And the super-low-end Aluratek Libre reader is now going for $99.99, down from $120.

Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) cheapest Nook, for the moment, is stuck at $149, but it’s hard to imagine that price sticking through Christmas.

Meanwhile, anyone have any sales data on any of these things? Amazon boasts that its new Kindles are its “fastest-selling ever.” And it declines, as always, to explain what that means in numerical terms. But I believe that’s as good as–or better than–Barnes & Noble, Borders, et al, which are even quieter about their sales.

At issue here are the “most favored nation” (MFN) contracts that guarantee Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) will receive the best e-book prices available.

“I fully understand that MFN’s are not per se illegal under our antitrust last,” Blumenthal wrote in a letter to Apple. “Yet, as I am sure you are aware, MFN’s are not per se legal either. MFN clauses — especially when they are offered to two of the largest e-book retail competitors in the United States — have the potential to impair horizontal competition by encouraging coordinated pricing and discouraging discounting. The net effect is fairly obvious, in that MFNs will reduce the publisher’s incentive to offer a discount to Apple if it would have to offer the same discount to Amazon, leading to the establishment of a price floor for e-books offered by the publisher.”

According to Blumenthal, that’s already happening. His office surveyed e-book prices for a number of bestsellers sold by Amazon, Apple, Borders and Barnes & Noble (BKS) and found them to be identical at all four companies. “These agreements among publishers, Amazon and Apple appear to have already resulted in uniform prices for many of the most popular e-books — potentially depriving consumers of competitive prices,” he concluded.

And they’re potentially doing it in an election year, which has got to make it even more troubling for an AG with senatorial ambitions and a clear proclivity for grandstanding …

Last week, Amazon fought back against its cheaper rivals with a price cut. And many people expect Jeff Bezos to combat the iPad by reinventing the Kindle, adding color and other features.

Here’s a step: Kindle titles that feature audio and video clips–if you read them on the iPad via Amazon’s Kindle app. The feature also works on the iPhone and iPod touch as well, but not the Kindle itself.

In theory, Amazon (AMZN) shouldn’t care whether its customers read e-books on its device or on Apple’s (AAPL) as long as they’re buying them from Amazon. But it may be a little risky for Bezos to highlight the advantages of his rival’s hardware.

Then again, these are pretty modest advantages, for now: Amazon is launching the feature with a mere 13 titles, and five of them are from travel guide writer Rick Steves. But the Steves guides underscore how useful audio can be in some cases: You can read what he has to say about the Louvre, and now you can listen to him, too.

The video is much cruder–a William Styron book has a glorified slide show, but not much else–which makes sense. There are plenty of books designed to be consumed with companion CDs or MP3s, but very few writers or publishers know what to do with moving images.

Maybe that will change now that they have hardware to play with. But my hunch is that it’s going to take some time for the book industry to get a handle on video. And by that time, perhaps the Kindle will be ready, too.

[Image credit: Visual dichotomy]

The Kindle goes for $259. But I bet if you wait a few weeks, you’ll be able to pick one up for less than $200.

Amazon’s competitors are certainly doing their best to push the Kindle’s price down. Last month, Borders (BGP) introduced the Kobo e-reader at $149; now Barnes & Noble (BKS) is pushing the base price for its Nook to the same level.

That price point doesn’t get you the built-in wireless connection that the Kindle boasts, but if you’re willing to pay $199, you can get that on the Nook, too.

If you want, you can argue that the price wars represent the book chains’ admission that they can’t compete with Amazon any other way. And if you follow that logic, Amazon can keep selling its gadget at a premium of 20 percent or more.

But Amazon (AMZN) is also facing pressure at the high end of the market. For $500, a little less than the price of two Kindles, you can pick up Apple’s (AAPL) entry-level iPad, which does a whole lot more than a basic e-reader. That middle ground is an uncomfortable place to be.

That is why lots of folks believe Amazon will also push the Kindle below $200, while adding new features, soon–“before the end of the summer,” predicts Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney. So if you’re in the market, it may be worth keeping your credit card sheathed for a month or so.

The Dutch company had been producing readers aimed at European business users before entering the U.S. market this spring via distribution deals at Barnes & Noble (BKS) and Best Buy (BBY). But you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyone who bought the $400 DR800SG (read Walt Mossberg’s review of the device).

There is still a flood of e-readers on the way, though: Borders (BGP), for instance, promises to sell at least 10 different brands by the end of the year. But none of them will be produced by Amazon (AMZN) or Apple (AAPL), and it’s going to be hard to persuade customers to buy anything that doesn’t come from one of those two companies.

Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you’ll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It’s as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?

Much of this problem stems from the publishing industry, which has demanded that e-bookstores embed digital rights management software in most best sellers to keep them from being stolen and swapped, free, online. The music labels once asked the same from digital-music retailers, but eventually agreed to open up.

The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Apple Inc. (AAPL), Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) and Sony Corp. (SNE) all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple’s new iBooks store can be read only on Apple’s own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple’s virtual bookshelf. (So I hope iBooks customers like Apple’s light-brown wood paneling.)

Browsing Amazon.com on the Kindle

Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.

Amazon, which jump-started the shift to e-books with its Kindle, lets customers read its e-books through apps on at least six kinds of devices. Amazon custom-built the free apps for gadgets that include the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and (later this summer) devices running Google’s (GOOG) Android software. If a device has an Internet connection, the apps automatically load Amazon e-book purchases from the company’s website, saving you the fuss of keeping track of files and transferring them between gadgets with cables. In many ways, this is more convenient than the way we manage our digital-music collections by manually adding and deleting files from iPods through a computer.

Amazon’s apps are slick and work on many of the most popular devices today, but Amazon buyers should know that they’re likely stuck using the retailer’s software forever. While Amazon says it plans to keep making apps for more devices, the list of potential devices for reading grows longer every day. Moreover, Amazon sells its e-books in a proprietary format, so there’s no way to open those files on another device without an Amazon app or without resorting to cumbersome (and potentially illegal) third-party conversion software.

The Nook with Barnes & Noble store

Barnes & Noble, too, adopted an Internet-connected app approach, providing a seamless way to shift its e-books between the Nook, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone, WindowsMobile for the HTC HD2 and soon iPad. Barnes & Noble has been integrating its e-bookstore into niche e-reading devices, like those by Plastic Logic, Irex and Pandigital. It also, uniquely, offers you the chance to “loan” some e-book purchases to a friend for 14 days. But its bookstore requires a somewhat annoying step: Each time you download a book to a new device, you must enter your name and the credit-card number that was used to buy the book in order to unfasten the digital lock on the book.

Beyond the apps, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Apple and a few smaller e-bookstores all promised they’d put their weight behind the industry standard format ePub, which is the e-book version of music’s Mp3 and can be read by almost every reading device (except the Kindle). That sounds great in theory, but in practice, the ePub files either can’t be transferred or doing so is cumbersome.

The problem is each company adds digital rights management software to an ePub book. A copy of “Moby Dick” I bought from iBooks delivered just blank pages when I opened it on the Nook. A Barnes & Noble e-book produced an error message in Sony’s PC ePub reading software. Barnes & Noble says its books will be compatible with devices like the Sony Reader after a software upgrade.

An iPad showing Apple’s iBooks store.

There were two notable exceptions: Purchases from Sony’s e-bookstore and a Borders Group (BGP)-backed store called Kobo could open on the Nook and other ePub-reading devices if I used a free program from Adobe (ADBE) called Digital Editions to transfer it. That’s a nice insurance policy but the process is far more complicated than it should be.

There may yet be a third way. Google, which plans to launch an e-bookstore later this year, says customers will be able to access its books through apps on popular devices and through a Web browser on any device—including a phone or computer. Google’s argument is that we shouldn’t lock ourselves into one bookstore if it is going to offer titles that are dependent on special apps or devices. Google’s existing free out-of-copyright books service works under this same general premise, but it isn’t yet ready for prime time. It requires you to always be online to read a book and its pages aren’t well formatted for reading on small screens or mobile devices. Google executives say they will fix both issues when the commercial service launches.

For now, the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. Anybody who just wants a simple way to carry digital books around might be happy with an app-based approach. But readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.

Walter S. Mossberg will return June 10.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100526/e-bookstores/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090825/sonys-kindle-competition-touchscreen-plus-att-for-399/ http://allthingsd.com/20090825/sonys-kindle-competition-touchscreen-plus-att-for-399/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:53:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=10266 Sony did indeed have a bit of news to announce at the New York Public Library: Its most direct challenge to Amazon’s Kindle to date. Like the Kindle, the “Daily” reader will feature a wireless connection–Sony (SNE) will use AT&T (T), while Amazon (AMZN) uses Sprint (S). And unlike the current versions of the Kindle, the Sony device will feature a touchscreen.

But it will come at a price: The device, shown below (click on image to enlarge), will retail in December for $399. That’s $100 more than the current price of Amazon’s Kindle 2. And that price point is almost certain to drop in coming months.

Sony wouldn’t let reporters handle the Daily, and didn’t put it through its paces, either. So hard to get a sense of much here. But here’s a video I shot of Sony exec Steve Haber holding the machine while talking up its virtues — which include free access to books from your public library.

EXTRA, EXTRA: SONY’S DAILY EDITION ROUNDS OUT NEW LINE OF DIGITAL READERS

Wireless 3G Reader Extends Sony’s Commitment to Bring
Open Digital Reading to Mass Audience

NEW YORK, August 25, 2009 Delivering on its promise to give consumers a variety of choices, Sony today announced the third member of its new Reader family–the Reader Daily Edition™, a highly-anticipated wireless model with 3G connectivity. The Daily Edition caps its new line of Reader products, joining the Reader Pocket Edition™ and the Reader Touch Edition™ which were announced earlier this month.
The Reader Pocket Edition and the Reader Touch Edition are available immediately, and the Reader Daily Edition will be available this December in time for the holidays at SonyStyle stores and SonyStyle.com.
“We firmly believe consumers should have choice in every aspect of their digital reading experience,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “Today, we take another large stride to deliver on that promise. We now have the most affordable devices on the market, the greatest access to free and affordable eBooks through The eBook Store from Sony and our affiliated ecosystem, and now round out our Reader offering with a wireless device that lets consumer purchase and download content on the go.”
A Family of Three Readers
The Reader Pocket Edition sports a five-inch electronic paper display packaged in a stylish chassis and is available in a variety of colors, including navy blue, rose and silver. It is available for the ground-breaking price of $199, making it the most affordable dedicated reading device on the market.
The Reader Touch Edition features a responsive, menu-driven six-inch touch screen panel that enables quick, intuitive navigation, page turning, highlighting and note taking with the swipe of a finger or by using the included stylus pen. It comes in red, black or silver and retails for about $299.
The Reader Daily Edition gives consumers wireless access via AT&T’s 3G mobile broadband network to Sony’s eBook store from just about anywhere in the U.S. Book lovers will be able to browse, purchase and download books as well as select newspapers and magazines when and where they want. There are no monthly fees or transaction charges for the basic wireless connectivity and users still have the option to side load personal documents or content from other compatible sites via USB.
The seven-inch wide, touch screen display provides for intuitive navigation and comfortable layout of content, including newspapers and magazines, whether you’re reading in portrait or landscape orientation. In portrait mode, about 30-35 lines of text are visible, making the experience very similar to that of a printed paperback book. A high contrast ratio with 16 levels of grayscale ensures that text and images are crisp and easy to read. The Daily Edition also boasts an attractive aluminum body with an integrated cover for durability. It has enough internal memory to hold more than one thousand standard eBooks and expansion slots for memory cards to hold even more. It will sell for about $399.
All three models feature Sony’s award-winning industrial design and an E Ink® Vizplex™ electronic paper display that emulates the look of ink on paper. Sony’s eBook Library software 3.0, which now includes support for many Apple® Macintosh® computers as well as PCs, makes it easy to transfer and read any Adobe® PDF (with reflow capability), EPUB, Microsoft® Word®, BBeB® files, or other text file formats on the Reader.
Access to Even More Content at the eBook Store by Sony
In addition to announcing a new family of Readers, Sony has also made several changes and improvements to its eBook Store to provide better access to an even greater variety of ebooks. Earlier this summer Sony announced the availability of more than one million free public domain books from Google, and the company made new releases and New York Times bestseller titles available for $9.99.
Today also marks the launch of Sony’s Library Finder application. Sony, working with OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), the leading global digital distributor of eBooks and to libraries, will now offer visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library’s collection of eBooks. Thousands of libraries in the OverDrive network offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library’s download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader. At the end of the library’s lending period, eBooks simply expire, so there are never any late fees.
The Reader Pocket and Touch Editions, as well as available accessories such as AC adaptors, cases and covers with reading lights, are available now at SonyStyle.com and SonyStyle stores. Book lovers interested in trying out a Reader in person will also be able to find them for sale at Best Buy, BJs, Borders, Sam’s Club, Staples, Target, Toys“R”Us, Wal-Mart and other authorized retailers nationwide.

DIGITAL READING ECOSYSTEM EXPANDS FOR SONY’S READER

NEW YORK, August 25, 2009 Further evidence of the broad support for its open approach to digital reading, Sony today announced relationships with a variety of traditional and digital publishers who provide content in industry standard formats to create a universe of reading material compatible with the Reader.
All of these sites will offer content in the EPUB format, the International Digital Publishing Forum’s (IDPF) XML-based standard format for reflowable digital books and publications. EPUB has gained acceptance among major trade book publishers with dozens of publishers already producing the majority of their eBooks using the standard. Sony recently announced that the company is transitioning its entire content library to the EPUB format, giving consumers the freedom to purchase or download free eBooks from the eBook Store by Sony and read them on any EPUB-compatible device.
“From the beginning, we have said that an open format means more choice for consumers,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “Now, working with other industry leaders, we can provide a device that is compatible with the widest selection of content available. Readers can shop around for what interests them rather than be locked into one store.”
Sony’s eBook Store already provides access to more than one million public domain Google Books in EPUB format and, starting today, Sony’s Library Finder application will go live. Library Finder offers visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library’s collection of eBooks. Thousands of libraries offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library’s download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader.
Other sites offering EPUB content include:
• Independent Bookstores–More than 200 participating members of the American Booksellers Association–including stores such as Tattered Cover (Denver, CO) and Vroman’s Bookstore (Pasadena, CA)–will have the ability to sell e-content to consumers beginning this fall. The stores using ABA’s IndieCommerce platform will offer content in the EPUB format and protected by Adobe’s Content Server 4 (ACS4) digital rights management, which is compatible with Sony e-Reader products. In addition, plans are underway to make Sony’s e-Reader devices available for purchase from independent bookstores in time for this holiday season. ABA is a not-for-profit trade organization devoted to meeting the needs of its core members–independently owned bookstores with storefront locations–through education, information dissemination, business products and services, and advocacy.
·        BooksOnBoard–BooksOnBoard, the largest independent eBook bookseller and member of both the ABA and IDPF, has been a staunch supporter of the EPUB standard through its founder Bob Livolsi. BooksOnBoard was the first eBook site to offer the EPUB standard to its burgeoning customer base and has sold more EPUB formatted books than any other online bookstore. BooksOnBoard believes that the EPUB standard significantly benefits the publisher, authors and most importantly the consumer.
·        NetGalley–NetGalley is an innovative and easy-to-use online service and connection point for book publishers, reviewers, media, librarians, booksellers, bloggers and educators. NetGalley delivers digital galleys and promotional materials to professional readers and helps promote new and upcoming titles. Starting today, NetGalley will support the Reader with the ability to download a protected PDF file and this fall the company will offer digital galleys in EPUB format.
• Powell’s Books and Powells.com–Powell’s Books is the largest independent bookseller in the world.  Innovative since its inception in 1971, it was one of the first booksellers online (beginning in 1994), and one of the first to sell eBooks for reading devices (the Rocket eBook) in 1999. Powell’s offers EPUB content for a wide range of compatible devices, including the Sony line.  Powell’s is an important player in the open access world of eBooks, where titles are provided by a wide range of publishers in a competitive retail environment, read on a range of devices, and downloaded and owned by millions of people around the world.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090825/sonys-kindle-competition-touchscreen-plus-att-for-399/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081202/why-are-music-sales-dropping-because-its-hard-to-buy-music/ http://allthingsd.com/20081202/why-are-music-sales-dropping-because-its-hard-to-buy-music/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:34:52 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1563 Digital is the future, but analog is the present. Which is why CD sales remain the biggest revenue driver for the music business. But big-box retailers, who sell almost all of the industry’s discs, are determined to change that, by relentlessly cutting back on the amount of floorspace they allocate to CDs.

Latest example: Borders Group (BGP), the struggling book chain, has cut its music inventory by 30 percent in the last year, the company said. Music now occupies about seven percent of its floorspace, and the space it used to take up has been given over to higher-margin products like children’s books.

Borders makes up a relatively small portion of U.S. music sales, but most big retailers have been doing the same thing for more than a year. If you don’t believe me, try to find the CD section next time you visit a Target (TGT) or Best Buy (BBY) this month.

The big stores will embrace individual albums–if they have an exclusive, like Best Buy’s deal with Guns N’ Roses, or Wal-Mart’s (WMT) recent AC/DC promotion. (That’s Best Buy’s GNR promotion, pictured above. Lonely, isn’t it?) But beyond that, they are basically telling music shoppers, who bought some $7 billion worth of discs last year, to take their business elsewhere.

[Image Credit: Idolator]

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